The fourth volume of this superb series of Mark Twain's Letters
is the thickest thus far, reflecting the growing social and professional
complexity
of Samuel Clemens's life in his middle thirties.

The two-year period represented by this volume has a painful dramatic
unity, beginning
and ending with Clemens on the lecture circuit, writing to Olivia Langdon
(first
as his fiancee, then as his wife). The early letters are filled with
anticipation
of the marriage of Sam and Livy; other letters take us through the
fairy-tale surprise
of Jervis Langdon's gift to the couple of a handsomely-equipped home in
Buffalo,
and a partial ownership in the Buffalo Express.
The reader who knows the outline of Clemens's life will experience these
happy
letters with dread, however, and perhaps a guilty sense of voyeurism,
knowing of
events about to befall the young family.

The tragedy unfolds in Clemens's letters: his father-in-law, Jervis Langdon
who represented
the father Clemens had long desired dies of stomach cancer, after
exhausting weeks
of bedside vigil by Sam and Livy. A friend of Livy comes to visit, falls
ill of typhoid, and dies in the Clemens home. Livy collapses from the
strain of these events,
nearly loses her first child, and finally gives birth to a sickly son. The
Clemenses
flee Buffalo, their early happiness there having become an agony after
"eight months' sickness & death" (347). Sam is driven by his
consequent lowered productivity
back onto the lecture circuit, after earlier promises to Livy to remain at
home.
And, of course, more misfortune will pursue the couple in the year
following the
close of this volume, with the death of their young son Langdon.

This two-year period, in fact, provides a kind of overture to the decades
to come,
which will repeat, on a larger scale, the pattern of domestic happiness
followed
by illness, flight, bereavement, and guilt. Late in his life, Clemens
again would
exhibit the complicated relationship to his craft he first shows here,
finding it both a torment
(in his need to maintain his comic mask during personal misfortune), and a
therapeutic
escape.

In the short run, however, these letters document the resiliency of Sam and
Livy,
and the beginning of patterns of life that would hold through most of the
70s and
80s. In place of the abandoned Buffalo home, a house in the Hartford
suburb of Nook
Farm is rented, and plans begin for the home in which (as it would turn
out) their daughters
would be raised. Quarry Farm, the home of Susan and Theodore Crane above
Elmira,
becomes a place of refuge, as it would be for the remainder of Clemens's
years in
the United States. In spite of delays, fatigue, and interruption, the
composition of Roughing It
is pressed on to conclusion. Reminiscences of Hannibal in a letter to
Will Bowen
point the way toward the most potent material of his career.

During these two years Clemens was refining his related crafts as writer
and lecturer,
and his Mark Twain persona. This volume will not resolve the much-debated
question
of Livy's role in shaping Mark Twain, but it does provide much information about
his working habits, and about the network of family, friends, and
professional allies
who were in support of him.

Thus the two lecture tours represented here show Clemens still struggling
to earn
his later mastery. Letters to Livy, his agent James Redpath, and others
attest not
only to physical hardship uncomfortable hotels and fatiguing trains but his
difficulty
with writing the lectures themselves. Though famous even then as one of
the best of
America's platform performers, Clemens endured indifferent audiences and
bad reviews,
and rewrote while on the road, chipping and carving his lectures toward
success.
Similarly, while Roughing It
grinds toward conclusion, behind schedule, we find Clemens urgently
writing to Orion
and to western friends for material. Other projects as would be the case
throughout
his career are abandoned; Clemens persuades his publisher, Elisha Bliss,
Jr., to
fund an agent who is sent to South Africa to research a never- written book
on diamond
mining.

The most complicated professional relationship Clemens had at this time was
with his
publisher Bliss, as is amply documented here. To understand the nuances,
the reader
should consult Jeffrey Steinbrink's Getting to Be Mark Twain
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991); but much of the fencing,
mixed
affection and exasperation on both sides, and something of Bliss's skilled
management
of Clemens, is apparent in the letters. A remarkable event of this
relationship
is Bliss's hiring of Orion as an assistant in the American Book Company as
a favor to Sam
and as a way for Bliss to enforce his claim to Sam's loyalty. The volume
also provides
considerable insight into the endlessly fascinating relationship of Sam and
Orion,
that living parody of his younger brother's most quixotic character traits.

This volume, then, offers rich material for the serious scholar of Mark
Twain as well
as much of interest to the general Mark Twain fan. There are over 300
letters, about
half published here for the first time. Production is of the high quality
we expect
of a Mark Twain Papers volume. The editors provide the necessary
explanatory notes
for each letter, without submerging the letters under their weight. The
serious
apparatus is in the "Textual Commentaries" in the back of the
book, which provides
full information on the provenance of each letter, condition of the
manuscript (if it exists),
textual variants, and publishing history; and we see here the immense
effort of scholarship
behind this volume (roughly equivalent, I suspect, to building a
cathedral). The reader may also browse in five useful appendices:
"Genealogies of the Clemens
and Langdon Families," "Enclosures with the Letters,"
"Advertising Circular [for
his 1871-72 lectures]," "Book Contracts," "Photographs
and Manuscript Facsimiles."
In this last section, I was amused by the reproduction of a letter Sam
wrote on nine irregularly
torn tiny scraps of paper to his mother, with whom he always shared a
waggish sense
of humor.

I do have one reservation about the apparatus, however. The editors index
only the
letters themselves persons addressed, and references in the text not the
scholarship
used in the notes. Works of scholarship are placed in a bibliography
titled "References." This practice produces a clean,
single-purpose index, but renders impossible
any attempt to judge the extent to which the editors have drawn on
particular scholars,
or even to locate where that use might be. Nor is the
"References" section complete.
Jeffrey Steinbrink, for instance, the scholar (mentioned above) who has
most recently
written about this phase of Clemens's life, is not included at all in the
"References,"
though the editors do cite him in their notes on page 199.

This quibble, however, will not prevent the volume from being
indispensable. Fifty-five
dollars is more than pocket change for most of us, but, considering the
editorial
hours involved, the price is a bargain. All libraries should buy it, and
many Mark
Twain scholars will want to own their own copies.

The series of publications from the Mark Twain Papers, now directed by
Robert Hirst,
has been a jewel of American scholarship for nearly thirty years. Its
continuance,
and the publication of its texts at reasonable prices, depends on grants
and private
donations. The present volume acknowledges support of the National
Endowment for the
Humanities, and also of gifts to the Mark Twain Papers from dozens of
individuals.
In an era of declining funds from federal agencies, such support by
friends of Mark
Twain scholarship, such as members of the Forum, is essential.